The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  50. 74th Cong., Congressional Record, 437–41.

  51. Abt, Advocate and Activist, 50.

  52. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, President’s Official File #83, Disasters Box 2: Letter of September 10, 1935.

  53. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, President’s Official File #83, Disasters Box 2: Letter enclosing the Akron editorial (September 9) from a Roosevelt partisan who was worried about “propaganda like this.”

  54. Drye, Storm, 232.

  55. Record Group 69 006.1, WPA, Selected Records Relating to the 1935 Florida Hurricane. Statement of John A. Russell.

  56. Joseph North to Hemingway, September 10, 1935; Hemingway Collection correspondence file.

  57. Melver, Hemingway’s Key West, 71.

  58. Ernest Hemingway, “Who Murdered the Vets?” New Masses, September 17, 1935, 9.

  59. Ibid., 10.

  60. “Lincoln Steffens Speaking,” Pacific Weekly (Carmel, Calif.), September 23, 1935.

  61. Telegram from North to Hemingway, September 14, 1935; Hemingway Collection correspondence file.

  The News seems to be on to the ways of the anti–New Dealers: “Every time a CCC boy out in Colorado is killed by a falling tree . . . we can expect to hear from the Communists and old dealers that Roosevelt was responsible.”

  62. The estimate of 250–260 is based on Willie Drye’s analysis after spending several years on Storm.

  63. Carolyn Bartlett, “The Labor Day Hurricane of ’35,” Islamorada Free Press, August 31, 1988, 20. After the storm, Islamorada was a blank. One of the few structures that remained standing was a stone angel with a broken wing. During the hurricane, the angel was lifted from tiny Pioneer Cemetery, a final resting place for early residents of the Islamorada area, and dropped on the Old Highway that existed at the time. The angel can be seen today inside a fence on the grounds of Cheeca Lodge. Just beyond is a hurricane monument that marks a mass grave. A large stone features an impression of palm trees swaying with the wind, and beneath the tiled mosaic that forms the base of the monument are the ashes of many who died in the 1935 hurricane.

  64. Gregory H. Hemingway, Papa: A Personal Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 136–37.

  65. Letter to FERA, October 15, 1935, FDR Library.

  66. “New Bonus Drive Pledged by V.F.W.,” New York Times, September 18, 1935.

  67. Miami Herald, “Hurricane Survivors Recall Terror of ’35,” September 2, 1991.

  68. Identical AP stories were filed in the New York Times and the Washington Post on October 13, 1935, with different headlines: “Florida Storm Toll Avoidable, Legion is Told” (Post) and “300 Storm Deaths Called Needless” (Times).

  69. The front-page New York Times story on the American Legion hearings, October 15, 1935, was nothing less than sensational:

  Men in Key Camps Called “Deserted,”

  Witness at Legion Inquiry Says Officers Left Veterans “to Their Fate.”

  —WASHINGTON IS ACCUSED—

  Declared to Have Delayed a Day

  in Authorizing Florida Storm

  Relief Train.

  70. This appears in the final report of the American Legion.

  71. Report to the President of the United States, September 8, 1936, 3–4, FDR Library.

  72. Report of Special Investigation Committee, Florida Hurricane Disaster, to National Executive Committee, the American Legion, by Quimby Melton, Georgia, Chairman, FDR Library.

  73. Letter from FDR to Murphy, November 15, 1935, FDR Library.

  74. American Legion Magazine, January 1936, 5–7.

  75. NARA Record Group 15, Sub-Group 5–3,Washington Records Group, Suitland, Maryland.

  76. Ibid.

  Chapter 12: V Day for the Veterans

  1. Herbert M. Mason, “Battling for the Bonus,” VFW: Veterans of Foreign Wars Magazine, May 1999, 18.

  2. George Gallup, “America Speaks: Pay Cash Bonus, Say 55% in Weekly Poll,” Washington Post, December 8, 1935.

  3. Before that broadcast was over, Coughlin had a stunning announcement. His political party, the National Union for Social Justice, claimed it had just ended an initial period of twelve working days (December 13 to January 3) in which it had created a political organization for its “crusade.” The results were stunning: 56,677 “units” of the party had been founded or were in the process of organizing. A unit contained a minimum of 100 members, allowing Coughlin to boast that in less than a month he had signed up 5,267,700 members. He closed by charging that the new Congress would deepen the nation’s debt through more borrowing, creating “new bonuses for bankers.” He added, “It is our business to organize so that the Seventy-fifth Congress of 1937 will be composed of Americans who restore America to its citizens.” Reprint of his broadcast, “The Bonus and Neutrality,” published by the Radio League of the Little Flower, Detroit.

  4. Ickes, Secret Diary, 525. His entry for Friday, January 24, 1936: the president, speaking about the bonus bill, said “he had written it out in longhand and had worked on it until one o’clock Thursday morning. He had told neither [Marvin] McIntyre [a presidential secretary] nor [press secretary Steve] Early what he proposed to do on the bill, but he had instructed Early to prepare two press releases, one on the basis of a veto and one on that of an approval. . . . He chuckled as he spoke of how he had ‘put it over’ on McIntyre and Early. . . . I cannot see either the politics or the statesmanship in a course of this sort. . . . I do not like this playful attitude on such an important measure.”

  5. Ibid., 525.

  6. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 791, and David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 200.

  7. 70th Cong. 2nd sess., 1936, Congressional Record 80, pt 1:1080.

  8. Washington Herald, January 28, 1935.

  9. Farley to Roosevelt, July 31, 1936, FDR Library.

  10. Johnson to Early, FDR Library.

  11. The pamphlet carries no further information as to its author or publisher. An interesting line in its foreword discusses the “Great Bonus March on Washington”: “The Veterans declared that there are certain rights and privileges which belong to every citizen—the right to a decent life, and the right—implied rather than specified—to turn to your County for sympathetic help when you are in need.”

  12. “Vets’ Bonus Hit by Mrs. Rogers,” Washington Times Herald, January 4, 1931, Edith Nourse Rogers Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard.

  13. One final irony to the vote that passed the bonus was that Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, the one person in Congress in whom the veterans, by all accounts, had the most faith, voted against it, as she had with all the previous votes. She was given a free pass by the veterans on this issue because they respected her firm belief that the cost of redeeming the certificates would work against her efforts to obtain an omnibus hospitalization bill for all veterans who became ill. Rogers was now fighting to get broader health care coverage for all vets. She believed that the bonus certificate was the only insurance a veteran’s family had. She did, however, support legislation to grant special relief for veterans in need. In June 1932, she had said the Bonus Army “represented maladjustments in the economic structure,” which she felt should be fixed, but not by cashing in the veterans’ sole item of value. “Bonus Army Analyzed by Congresswoman,” Times Herald, June 12, 1932, Rogers Papers.

  14. “Mrs. Rogers to Sift U.S. ‘Terrorism,’” Boston American, February 28, 1936, Rogers Papers.

  15. “Armed Man Terrorizes House,” Evening Star, December 13, 1932; unpaginated scrapbook item, Rogers Papers. The scrapbook also yields a rare four-deck headline from the Boston Post of December 14:

  CONGRESSMEN FLEE MADMAN WITH GUN

  Mrs. Rogers of Bay State is Heroine When Crack Marksman Waves Loaded Weapon

  in House Gallery—Chamber Terrorized Before He is Disarmed—Intended to

  Make 20-Min
ute Speech and Shoot Any Interferer.—

  Woman Member Calmly Tries to Quiet Him—Walks Toward Him Talking, Unafraid

  Dynamite Found in Room He Occupied—Going to Blow Himself Up Afterward

  16. Rankin and Patman carefully used the witness to establish the point that dangerous weather was to be found in all sectors of the country, and that the veterans in the Keys would have been in just as much jeopardy in New England or other parts of the South.

  Mr. Patman: “So you can hardly go to an area in the United States where there is not the possibility of having your life taken by a flood or storm or hurricane or earthquake?”

  Mr. Tannehill: “That is right.”

  Mr. Patman: “I think that is all.”

  Mrs. Rogers: “I have just one more question, Mr. Chairman. . . . Basing your opinion upon your scientific knowledge of storms, do you consider the area in Matecumbe a safe place to be in a hurricane?”

  Mr. Patman: “In a hurricane?”

  Mrs. Rogers: “Yes.”

  Mr. Patman: “No place is safe. I will object to that question.”

  Mrs. Rogers: “I am asking the witness.”

  Chairman Rankin: “The Chair will take judicial notice of the fact that Matecumbe, Tupelo, Mississippi, Massachusetts, or anywhere else is unsafe in time of storm, and it is unnecessary to embarrass the witness.”

  Mrs. Rogers: “I asked the question, Mr. Chairman.”

  She persisted, changing the phrase in her question to “during the storm season.” When the witness was finally allowed to speak, he said it would be a safe place to live if the utmost precautions were taken.

  Mrs. Rogers: “You mean if they built houses that were suitable.”

  Mr. Tannehill: “Or go somewhere else when the storm warning is posted.”

  U.S. House of Representatives. Committee on World War Veterans Legislation, Florida Hurricane Disaster, 204–5.

  17. Ibid., 450.

  18. Box 13, folder 170, Rogers Papers.

  19. Abt, Advocate and Activist, 50. Abt’s memoir underscores the problem with the “act of God” report and the subsequent hearings in that these are the major “primary sources” available to researchers, of whom more than one has been led astray because of the effectiveness of the suppression of the Kennamer report and the fact that few know about the American Legion report.

  20. Drye, Storm, paperback ed., 2003, 322–24. Drye got to see the carbon held by Shelton’s only surviving child, Rae Shelton Cummings of Vero Beach, Florida, who has no idea how her father got the document, which is almost certainly the one extracted by Aubry Williams. Quoting directly from the postscript to the new edition of Storm of the Century, Drye, who has read the 56-page report, wrote, “In Abt’s view, Shelton and his boss, Fred Ghent, handled the hurricane emergency exactly as they should have. They made no mistakes, nor were they guilty of even minor lapses of judgement.” Abt acknowledged the fact that some witnesses gave testimony that blamed the three men cited by Kennamer but attributed this to the ordeal that he had lived through—”severe mental and physical strain.”

  21. “Veterans’ Home Closing Leaves ‘Mother’ Steed without Boys,” Washington Star, June 25, 1938, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  22. “Fifty Veterans Here Say Farewell to Home the Bonus Will Close,” Washington Post, June 13, 1936, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  23. Associated Press report from Washington, June 13, 1936.

  24. Bridgeport Post, June 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18, 1932.

  25. Lester G. Telser, “The Veterans’ Bonus of 1936 and the Abortive Recovery from the Great Depression” (Master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 2000).

  26. “Veterans in Washington Area to Get $40,000,000 Baby Bonds,” Washington Herald, January 28, 1936; Washington Times, June 6, 1936, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  27. New York Times, February 8, 1936.

  28. Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1936.

  29. “Bonus Joy and Woe: Dizzy Goings-On in No Man’s Land of Sudden Wealth,” Literary Digest, June 27, 1936, 7.

  30. “‘Box-Car’ Alferi’s 1-Track Mind Shunts from Bonus to Pension,” Washington Post, October 17, 1936. Alferi’s penultimate trip to Washington for the veteran’s rights comes in October, when he returns— now beginning to plump for pensions—with $50 of his bonus money left. He promises to return in January of 1937 for the opening of Congress, where he will advance his new agenda.

  31. Interview, September 24, 2002.

  32. What did the bonus actually do for the economy? According to an analysis based on the work of Lester G. Telser from the University of Chicago by Aaron Jaffe, a student at Brandeis University working on this project as a researcher in the summer of 2002: “The bonds were most likely bought by wealthier members of society using funds that would not otherwise have been marked for consumption. One does not buy long-term government bonds if it would require any substantive change in spending patterns, so it is likely that the bonds were bought, and the bonuses issued, without taking any significant amount of money from the national system. Additionally, upon receipt of their bonuses the veterans spent about 80 percent of their face value in the first few months, leaving the remaining 20 percent untouched an entire year so it could accumulate interest. (The relatively generous interest rate of 3 percent, which was a full half percent over the national maximum for savings accounts, could only be claimed if the bonus wasn’t cashed out for a full year.) The net increase in the money supply during the time when the bonus was issued did not differ greatly from its normal pattern throughout the ’30s, so any improvement could not be attributed to inflation. Yet the economy did jump shortly after the issuing of the bonus in ’36 and again in ’37 when most of the remaining 20 percent of bonus certificates were cashed. The amount of money did not increase drastically because the payment of the bonus was not funded by printing more money, the inflationist technique advocated by Wright Patman. The veterans needed all the money they could get for life’s necessities, and since the interest rate on unclaimed bonuses was higher than that of a normal savings account, it was foolish to cash out more than was going to be spent. But, if the money supply wasn’t increased, why did the economy improve so sharply shortly after the issuing of bonuses, and to a lesser extent, a year afterward? The reason is that Congress was willing to greatly increase its national debt. The government, in effect, borrowed money from wealthier Americans (in the form of secure and interest-bearing Treasury bonds) and gave it to a substantial minority of poorer Americans (the veterans of World War 1). The enlargement of the national debt actually helped, in the short term, to alleviate the pangs of the Depression.”

  33. “D.C. Rolls List 1,000 for Bonus,” Washington Star, June 16, 1936, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  34. Gudio van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 122–23.

  35. Ibid., 123n.18.

  36. Letter to the authors, November 3, 2003.

  37. Coughlin obituary, Washington Post, October 28, 1979.

  38. Material supplied by Jerry Wilkinson, the Upper Keys Historical Society, and through the society’s Web page, thefloridakeys.org. The monument accepted the ashes of survivors of the hurricane through the 1970s. In his book Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, Theodore Steinberg considered the memorial and put the 1935 hurricane into context: “What little inclination existed to remember the catastrophe itself, however, was drowned out by an act of collective amnesia as buildings rose around the memorial. Homes and commercial buildings flew up just a few feet above high tide. Construction proceeded with little concern for wind resistance. The wake-up call came in 1960, when Hurricane Donna—nearly identical to the earlier system in terms of its path and a close rival in intensity—slammed into the Florida Keys. Although few lives were lost, financially, Donna was Florida’s most destructive hurricane to date. ‘In the 25 years between Keys disasters,’ wrote Stephen Trumbull of the Miami Herald, ‘the few feeble voices for restricti
ons have been shouted down by the builders of shoddy if sometimes showy houses—and the fillers of tidal mangrove swamps for sponge-like subdivisions barely above normal high tides’” (79).

  Epilogue: The GI Bill—Legacy of the Bonus Army

  1. Washington Post, November 24, 1943. The ad would run again at least once, on December 8, 1943, and in many other papers.

  2. Frank Sinclair, They Can’t Eat Medals (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Journal, 1943), 51–52.

  3. Frank Sinclair, America Faces a Challenge (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Journal, 1943), 47.

  4. Ibid., 49–50.

  5. Moley, American Legion Story, 272.

  6. Ibid. 273.

  7. A search of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal for the first mention of the term “G.I. Bill of Rights” discovered that it first appeared in the Times on March 9, 1944: “Formerly known as the American Legion omnibus bill, the bill now carries the endorsement of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.” The coining of the name came from American Legion publicist Jack Cejnar, who first called it “a GI Bill of Rights,” as it offered federal aid to help veterans adjust to civilian life in the areas of hospitalization, purchase of homes and businesses, and especially, education.

  8. “Veterans Need Help Now,” Boston American, February 28, 1944; Edith Norse Rogers Papers, Series XI news clippings, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard.

  9. “G.I. Enemy No. 1.” Nation, May 6, 1944, 527.

  10. Michael D. Haydock , “The GI Bill,” American History, September–October, 1999, 52–56, 68–70.

  11. “Washington and You” column of June 1, 1944, Smith Library and Archives, scrapbook, vol. 448, 76.

  12. It is hard to footnote a negative finding, but a search of the Evening Star, the most political of the Washington papers for the period May 25–June 10 did not yield a single article on the GI Bill or the Rankin Committee.

  13. President’s Official File 4675-R, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

  14. Thomas A. Rumer, The American Legion, (New York: M.Evans and Co., 1990), 247–8.